


Let's Start With a Light in the Dark

by anthologia



Series: Superboy and the Invisible Girl [2]
Category: Batman (Comics), DCU (Comics), Robin (Comics), Superboy (Comics)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Always a Different Sex, Alternate Universe - Gender Changes, Depression, F/M, Hiding, Invisibility, Mental Health Issues, Panic Attacks, Tactile Telekinesis, Unwanted Superpowers
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2015-12-19
Updated: 2016-04-23
Packaged: 2018-05-07 13:36:26
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 3
Words: 2,264
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/5458346
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/anthologia/pseuds/anthologia
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Ficlets set in the same storyverse as "Son of Steel, Daughter of Air".</p><p>Progress is slow-going and hard-won.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> Title from "A Light in the Dark", Next to Normal.

STAR Labs has to take their time handling her case. Objective instrumentation is capable of detecting her, but anyone trying to interpret the data finds their attention skittering off to literally anything else. The scientists have to talk Kon through the more hands-on things like how to administer blood tests, because at least he can feel out where she physically _is_. (She tried to help by performing them herself, but it seems like it’s easier not to misplace her samples if there’s a middleman.)

Trial and error gives them a procedure for handling her. There’s a checklist, a set of basic everyday instructions on how to interact with her and more detailed reminders of what they’ve been working on. Eventually, they start bringing in a telepath, who has some success observing her once he _knows_ she’s there, even if it tends to cause headaches.

It’s… frustrating, _exhausting_ , how much effort it takes for them to just interact with her on a basic level. She thinks about giving up, sometimes, just walking away and letting them go back to their lives and their jobs and stop wasting time on someone who might as well be a ghost. It would be easy. She could follow someone onto their computer network and erase the data they’ve collected, get rid of the checklists. Without the repeated reminders that she exists, they wouldn’t even remember they were missing something. Kon would be more of a problem, but she’s pretty sure even he’d forget about her eventually, given enough time.

She goes so far as to leave the building for a full day, just to see how she’d feel. At first, it’s a relief, not having to fight so hard for the tiniest pieces of interaction. No one’s wasting their time on her. But an emptiness sets in again, hollowing her out and dragging her back down to that place where nothing she does matters.

Kon’s waiting in the room they gave her at the lab, sweeping the room every couple minutes with his TTK. Looking for her. It brushes over her shoulder, and his head jerks up. “Tim?”

“Yeah,” she says, even though she isn’t sure he’d know. He’s getting better at the fine concentration and control it takes to feel her out and interpret the motions of her mouth and vibrations of her voice in the air, but it’s still incredibly difficult.

His TTK circles her wrist, holding on desperately like she’ll melt away if he doesn’t keep ahold of her. He tugs her forward. “I thought you were – “

_Missing. Gone. Dead._ They’d effectively mean the same thing; he wouldn’t be able to find her again, no matter which it was. She takes another few steps forward, until she’s near enough for him to reach out and replace the TTK with his hand.

“Don’t disappear like that again, okay?” He gets a look of concentration on his face while he feels out the location of her hand so he can try to squeeze it. “Just don’t.”

She can’t promise it, so she just shrugs and lets him hold onto her until one of the scientists gets a reminder to check if she’s been found.


	2. Chapter 2

The working theory is that being imperceptible is a superpower of sorts that she _should_ be able to turn off and on at will. Something – probably the shock of her parents’ death – jumpstarted it before she was ready, so she couldn’t control it. The scientists have her working with a telepath on staff, looking for some way to gain control over the power.

She can’t do it on her own. _Yet_. But eventually, they think they’ve found a way for the telepath to reach into her head and switch it off, and hopefully, eventually, teach her how to do it on her own. When they’re ready to test it, they set up in a room with a half-dozen of the scientists that have been working on her case and the telepath and Kon, and Tim is trying desperately not to _hope_ too much in case it doesn’t work when she hears the question in her head: _ready?_

Not even slightly, but she says _yes_ anyway.

It feels like – it _hurts_ , like someone shoving a bone back into its socket. All the breath rushes out of her at once, and she barely even notices anything outside her own head until she feels Kon take her hand, quick and confident, with none of the TTK fumbling it usually requires.

“Hi, there,” Kon says, and she looks up. He’s smiling at her – _at_ her, not just in her direction. And it’s easy for a moment, just the two of them, and she smiles back.

Then her awareness abruptly widens, encompasses everyone else in the room _._ There’s too many of them, too many people, and she can feel the weight of their attention on her like a tangible force pressing down on her chest. She’d forgotten what that feels like, and it’s –

It’s _too much._ Tim spent the last few years of her life just wanting someone, _anyone_ , to be able to perceive her, and now everyone can, and she can’t, she can’t _breathe_.

“Woah, _hey_ ,” Kon says, as he squeezes her hand. “You’re okay. Tim? It’s okay.”

“I can’t – “

The switchover is worse going the other way, because a part of her _knows_ what’s happening and is desperate not to go back. She wants to scream and fight against it, but once it’s over, she can _breathe_ again.

_I’m sorry, we should have guessed this would be too much at once_ , she hears in her head, but the actual words spoken are “I think we should try this again at a later date.”

“What happened?” Kon asks. His hand is still on hers, but it’s gone slack. She slides hers out from under his and steps away. No one’s tracking her anymore, so it’s easy to just… disengage.

“She panicked, so I had to pull the plug on the experiment. I think we should try again in a less overwhelming environment, with maybe only one or two people present – “

Tim wraps her arms around herself and walks past the scientists and the equipment and everything, out into the hall. She considers just – not stopping, leaving the lab again like she’d tried to do before, but as wrung-out and exhausted as she feels right now, that feeling she had before they started working for this, emptiness and the building certainty that there was nothing left in life for her, was so much worse. So instead, she finds an empty room, somewhere no one would expect to find her, and sits and breathes until she’s ready to go back out and think about trying again.


	3. Chapter 3

Kon is _so_ out of his depth, and has been ever since he got the weirdest feeling that someone was with him and, on a hunch, reached out with his TTK to find a girl. Because he’s _great_ at rescuing damsels in distress (hello? _Superboy_?), but no one really taught him how to deal with the long, drawn-out emotional stuff that comes after, and Tim’s just… really fragile sometimes. Not in a weak way, because holy _shit_ he has no idea how she survived as long as she did when everyone in the world just suddenly forgot she existed. But like she’s been broken or cracked a bunch of times and had to put herself back together with whatever she had on hand. He’s scared that, if he tries to mess with it, he’s going to fuck up something worse.

Apparently no one else is scared he’ll mess up, though, because the second time they try to turn off her powers, it’s just him and Tim in a room – even the telepath figured he could work just as well through a wall, and the fewer people around, the better.

It’s not like she just appears out of nowhere, more like she was always there, out of focus, and suddenly he can focus on her again. She’s sitting on a chair across from him, with her legs pulled up against her chest, and staring at him like she’s ready to bolt at any second.

“Hi again,” he says with a grin and hopes that she doesn’t freak out this time. One of the STAR Labs scientists gave him a crash course on what to do if she had a panic attack or something, but he’s not really confident he’d know what he was doing.

“Hi,” she says, and her lips curve upwards in a tentative smile. Her fingers twitch like she wants to reach out and grab his hand but is too scared to, so he makes the first move, putting his hand on top of hers. And then he thinks _screw it_ , pulls her forward and turns it into an actual hug, because she looks like she’s going to cry again.

This close, it’s practically impossible not to notice how _tiny_ she is. Kon’s genetics are _amazing_ , but he’s not even close to full Super-height yet and she already pretty much fits under his chin. Plus, she’s thin. Really thin. Actually-looks-kind-of-sick, it’s-a-little-scary thin. It feels like he could snap something by accident just by holding her too tight.

“I don’t really know what to say,” she says, voice slightly muffled by his shoulder.

“That’s cool. We can just stay like this for a while, if you want.”

“Okay,” she whispers. She’s shaking, shivering like she’s freezing, although he can’t imagine how she could possibly be cold in the huge STAR Labs sweatshirt she’s wearing. He wraps his TTK around her anyway; people tell him it feels warm and tingly, like touching sunlight, so maybe it’ll help.

Eventually, she pulls back and tries smiling at him again. It makes her look cute, even with her face all splotchy and teary.

“How do you feel?”

“I don’t – “ She stops for a second and tugs on a lock of hair that’s fallen into her face. It’s long and black and kind of messy, but he figures there isn’t much opportunity to get stuff like regular haircuts when no one knows you’re alive. “I don’t know. I feel… I don’t know.”

“The doctors wanted to talk to you. You know, when you’re ready.” He stops, because she’s starting to look a little panicky. “It’s cool if you don’t want to talk to anyone else today. We could just hang out. You could tell me some stuff about yourself, maybe?”

“What – “ She breathes out, like she’s steadying herself. “What would you want to know?”

“Anything. Like, uh – “ He tries to think if she’s ever told him anything about her home, but he doesn’t think so. If she has, he’s pretty sure he can’t be blamed for having forgotten. “Where are you from?”

“Gotham. It’s not perfect, but it’s…” She shrugs, which is pretty much the same kind of thing Robin does when Kon asks her what she and Batman even _see_ in Gotham that’s worth sticking around for.

“Cool,” he says, because he can be tactful. Sometimes. “You ever seen Batman and Robin?”

He’s prepared to leverage the heck out of some name-dropping like _hey, I could get you in with Robin sometime_ , but she ducks her head and says, “Um, yeah. I used to follow them around. No one knew I was there, so…”

“So maybe you can answer a question Robin won’t,” he says, partly just to keep the conversation going and partly because he has a bet going with Impulse and he’s not sure if he can use a girl who erases her existence from everyone’s memories as a source but this is his _chance_. “Is Batman _really_ that dark and grim all the time, or have you seen him pick his nose like the rest of us?”

“ _Kon!_ ” She bursts into startled laughter, and it’s pretty much the first time he’s seen her look really _happy_ , at least that he can remember. It doesn’t last nearly long enough, so he figures he’s just going to have to figure out ways to make it happen again. “I’m not even answering that.”

“Everyone knows denial is the same thing as saying yes,” Kon says, and makes a note to tell Bart _I told you so_ later, even if he can’t explain his credible source.

She just shakes her head, like she wants to tell him he’s being an idiot but can’t bring herself to say it out loud.

“Can you tell me _any_ embarrassing stories about what he does when he’s alone? Cause Robin keeps shutting me down, and – are you okay?”

She lifts her head a little from where she’d just dropped it into her hands, still grimacing slightly. “I. No. I don’t know. I’m not sure what…” Her face goes blank for a second, maybe talking to the telepath in the other room. “I think it’s time for me to… go. Again.”

Stupidly, the first thing that pops into his head is _already? But you just got here_. But he gets it, kinda; this whole thing is a strain for her. “If that’s what you gotta do.”

She looks like she’s going to start crying, and he really, _really_ wants to give her a hug or something, but she’s already – not fading. But, like, flickering, here and gone for a few seconds, and then it’s a struggle again to remember that he hadn’t been alone in the room. He tries to reach out with TTK again, look for her, but he guesses he really is alone in the room now cause he can’t find her.

**Author's Note:**

> If you are interested in my fics and want more, I have an account at syntactition.tumblr.com where I have bits of stories that are currently in the works and other ficlets and stories that haven't made their way to AO3.


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